catalyst, firewall, router (failover)

[pamirian76]

hi,

I know that with pix 500 series you have U (unrestricted) and FO (failover).

do you have the same thing with routers?

I guess that's not possible to do with a catalyst because it implies that I'm going to need 2 connections from a system, 1 to each catalyst...

so is there any way to failover a router.

is there any way to failover a catalyst?

thanks.

[paddyxdoyle]

You can certainly load share VLANs using spanning tree between say an access switch with two uplinks both to seperate switches.

With routers, you can have two routers running HSRP.

In a nutshell this allows you to create a Virtual IP address, one of your routers is the primary for this address so forwards packets sent to this address to other devices on your network

The second router is the standby router for this address and only forwards packets should the primary router fail.

Or you can have multiple virtual addresses on both routers, providing gateways for different networks, which enables you to load share using both routers and still achieve resillience should either one of the routers or connected links fail

Unfortunately you don't benefit from the low pricing of your failover router as you do with a PIX-FO bundle :(

HTH

Paddy